Death is universal. There's no escaping it. It defines our lives, be it losing those we love, or those we admire. And, ultimately, we're all running the wrong way down an escalator, away from our own inevitable end. 

Despite the universality of death, grief can be a very unique and personal thing. If life can be viewed as a river, a loss of any magnitude will alter the course of the river's flow. It changes us, it changes our lives, and it comes to define us. There is no escaping grief. Even when we feel we've outrun it, it can catch us up when our guard is down, and remind us that it's just over our shoulder. It is insidious and cruel and indiscriminate, dripping its paralysing poison into our ears.

How we deal with that is down to the wiring of the individual. 

I saw the power of loss at too young an age. My family suffered a year where four close family members fell like dominoes.

While still grieving a cousin and an uncle, I remain haunted by the memory of hearing the phone ring, a week after the death of my nine month-old niece, and sitting on my mum's bed as she answered it. Numbed and battered, all she had to say before hanging up was a resigned, matter-of-fact, "Thank you for letting me know".

The call had been to tell her my beloved grandad, her father, had taken his own life by stopping the pills which had for years held back the massive heart attack which ultimately consumed him. She didn't have the strength to comfort even me, but by that stage it almost felt routine.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

​Not being one to pass up an easy gag, let’s talk about the ludicrous sequelitis of the Battlefield games. Here, I’m regurgutating a review of Battlefield V. V being for Victory, which totally gives away that for this game we’re back in 1940’s Hitler-punching territory: an era never before seen in gaming, assuming you have rampant amnesia coupled with crippling lethargy when it comes to fact checking.
 
V, of course, is also Roman for ‘Very nearly 6’, which they often shortened to 5.
 
Last year we had Battlefield 1, so named as it was set in World War One. Regardless, 5 doesn’t often follow 1. (Well, unless you’re my Mum: she once stapled the tip of a snapped tape measure back on, forgot about the repair truncating the start of one end of it, and then bought me a pair of mismeasured school trousers that were so tight I thought I’d put on about 2 stone overnight.)
 
Battlefield 1 itself followed Battlefield 4, so really that game should have been Battlefield 5 and this year’s effort Battlefield 6. Worse still, inbetween B1 and B4 there was the numeral-free Battlefield Hardline. But before B4, mercifully, was B3. So are the incorrect numerals just a recent thing?
 
Alas, no. Before B3 came Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943, Bad Company, Battlefield 2142 (what?), B2, Battlefield 1942 and…that’s it (and I haven’t even touched on expansions). There was never a game just called ‘Battlefield’ and Battlefield V, which should arguably be Battlefield VI, even arguablier shouldn’t be that eitheras it’s actually the 16thgame in the series – a series whose numbering, we must conclude, has been kept track of by idiots. 
 
Having slogged through this terrifically laboured mockery, you’ll be vastly relieved to hear there is actually a point to it. Two, in fact, and here they are: like its numerical positioning Battlefield V is more than a bit lost and confused, and in its 16thiteration it’s a regrettable example of the law of diminishing returns.

What about that weather, eh? Grr! Bloody weather <WAVES FIST AT SKY>.

We British love discussing the weather, and we love complaining about the weather, which is all a bit weird when you consider that our default weather tends to be "grey". I suppose that's why we get all excited when we hear it's going to be sunny, or there's snow on the way. Anything to break up the monotony. 

"Oh good! Something new to complain about!"

Remember last summer's extended heatwave, and how we all lolled around like we were dying, and missed the greyness?

If you'd bought into the previews, you'd be under the impression that weather plays a big part in Just Cause 4, but we'll get to that in a moment.

First I want to apologise for this review being so late. Truth is, I couldn't quite work up the enthusiasm to write it. Not because Just Cause 4 is a bad game, but because I feel like I'd already reviewed it. At least I've actually played this one, unlike the latest Call of Duty, which remains shoved down the side of my bed, still in its shrink-wrap. 

You see, for vast swathes of Just Cause 4 I felt I was playing Just Cause 3. And there were times when it could've been Just Cause 2. And adding to the sense of familiarity was that, if I squinted during certain sections, I could've been playing any one of a number of other open world destroy 'em ups.

However, just like an 100m athlete who has created a super-fast clone of himself that lacks a body from the neck down... I'm racing ahead.

Yes, you're right: that is a tortured metaphor. But hey - at least it's not raining, yet.

We've reached a weird time in the life of console hardware. Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 turn six this year - that's about 108 in human years - and usually by now we'd be hearing solid news of the next generation.

​Yes, we've all latched onto the rumours just out of sheer habit - we know a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Two (or whatever it'll be called) are in the works - but there doesn't seem to be much of an appetite for them, beyond the hardcore. Wisely, both Sony and Microsoft seem cautious about making any concrete announcements, lest they kneecap their current business.

Chances are we will get some sort of actual information this year, and there have even been reports that the PS5 could make it to market as early as Christmas 2019 (though that seems unlikely), but both Sony and Microsoft are slightly prancing around the issue.

And they're right to, because - particularly given that we have the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X more or less catering to those who want their games to have a little more oomph in the trouser department - there doesn't seem to be a need for a new generation cycle of consoles.

The problem both Sony and Microsoft are no doubt wrestling with is the same issue that Apple has slammed its fat face into; technology has reached something of a plateau. In the past, the leaps between hardware generations would be very obvious, but the jumps have become ever smaller and more incremental, to the point that, when the PS4 first came out, it was hard to see what it offered over the PS3.

Indeed, Nintendo's Switch isn't particularly significantly more powerful than the Wii U - to the degree that its biggest launch title, Breath of the Wild, was released concurrently with a more or less identical Wii U version. What Nintendo did do, however, was offer something more than just more graphical power, by making it a hybrid handheld thing.

With the Switch being a bona-fide success - and demonstrating that, perhaps, consumers care less about raw power than Sony and Microsoft would like to believe - that's a path that's now closed to the PS5 and Xbox Two.

So what are the options for Sony and Microsoft, and the future of their hardware business? Are there any?

I'm old. But also, I'm middle-aged. And also, according to my eightysomething parents, I'm a young man. It's all relative, and in the eye of the beholder, and all that.

I turn 48 this year. There are days when that figure alarms me; I was 21 when Digitiser launched 26 years ago. It feels like a long time ago, but also yesterday. Yet in another 26 years I'm going to turn 74. If I think about that too much, then I feel a sense of time running out.

I think I got my mid-life crises out of the way a long time back, but part of the fear of getting old is that I've only relatively recently gotten my life where I want it, and I want to ensure I'm going to be able to enjoy it as long as possible. 

Yeah, I know I should exercise more - though the demands of life and work seem to leave little time or energy for that. But there are also things happening with my body which no amount of exercise can hold back; it takes me about an hour every day until my joints ease up, I've got arthritic toes, my eyesight has gone - almost overnight - from being shortsighted to longsighted.

On the rare occasions I booze it up it takes three days to recover. I like being in bed most nights by half-eight. My guts aren't what they were...

And I know this is only the start of a gradual downward slide. If you take the physical stuff out of the equation, though, I've never been in ruder health, never felt more "me". And part of being me is liking video games.

The sad reality is, however, that because of my age, there are those who feel I shouldn't like video games...

2018 was a pretty good year for games, yeah? 2019 could be too. We know there are some big sequels on the way, the launch of some major new franchises, and some quirky potential gems.

Let's not faff around like idiots; here are all the games I'm looking forward to this year, and several I couldn't give less of a plump fig about. 

​Plummmmmppp-pp.

Belated happy new ones to ye! Hope you all had a decent festive break, and it wasn't too mired in finally-stopped-work illness and family tantrums. I thought now would be as good a time as any to check in with happenings in the Digiverse, and what is being planned for 2019 - as well as inviting some feedback (always a dangerous game, I know).

If you're a Patreon or Kickstarter backer you've been getting regular insights, but not everyone is - so I figured it was worth opening this up to everyone. 

Here's a vague timeline for (some of) what I have on my plate - aside from the need to also earn a living - and the order I intend to get it done in:

Continue daily Digitiser2000 updates.

Finish sending out the Found Footage backer rewards, and upload the missing footage, bringing that project to a long-overdue end. 

Get Digitiser The Show Episode 1 re-uploaded.

Edit the backer exclusive episode.

Continue with ongoing Digitiser mini episodes - including filming some videos with my co-hosts.

Fulfil Digitiser The Show backer rewards.

Digitiser Live.

Digitiser The Show Series 2...

And it's on that final point that I would like your input. 

I've long had a well-documented love/loathe relationship with VR. My issues have been myriad, but chief among them is that, following an ear infection a few years ago, I've become susceptible to motion sickness.

I appreciate that this makes me sound like a decrepit geriatric, but thick colds give me the sensation of being strapped to a waterbed during an earthquake, theme park rides render me clammy and woozy,  and when I made the mistake, a couple of days before Christmas, of looking at my phone while in the back of a cab, I came so close to "airing my stomach" that I wound down the window and started screaming at passers-by.

Suffice to say, I've not played anything in VR since Resident Evil VII - which was great and all that, but resulted in me fleeing outside to vomit over my neighbour's fence. Old-fashioned it may be, but I'm of an age where I prefer entertainment which doesn't make me throw-up. 

And then there's the other thing which was putting me off using my PSVR: the wires.

It was a faff-and-a-half to set up. The floor around my TV already resembles an eel farm, and the PSVR invited a fresh bed (the collective term for eels, apparently) to join this "liquorice orgy". It was only a matter of time until the wires got all knotted, and my bun-fisted behaviour ended up ripping off one of the HDMI connectors. And that is indeed what has happened. Which is fine, because I didn't want to play the thing anyway - because of the "ralphing".

And yet... VR as an idea still appeals. I get why people think it's the future. I get the potential. And thus, because it takes me a long time to learn my lesson, just before Christmas I splashed out on a mid-range Oculus Go in the hope that it would offer some family-friendly whimsy.
​
Behold, then, a very belated review of this.